Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

Offend the gay lobby in 2005, and you can't speak out on drugs in 2011: that's Home Office logic for you

The story of Dr Hans-Christian Raabe, the government’s drug adviser dismissed last Friday, offers a fascinating insight into Britain's intensely biased culture. That bias, should you be in any doubt, is pro-gay and anti-Christian. Voice or write anything that could be construed as anti-gay, and you become persona non grata in government circles; in Dr Raabe’s case, the Home Office that had appointed him on 10 January 2011 as one of 23 advisers to draw up its drugs policy revoked the appointment a mere 17 days later.

Had a camera caught Dr Raabe inhaling a spliff? Had a druggy exposed the Manchester GP’s specialist substance misuse clinic as a failure? No: the government revoked Dr Raabe’s appointment because in 2005, in Canada, the GP published (in conjunction with other medical experts) a research paper (read it here) that caused offence to homosexuals. The Home Office explained in a letter to Dr Raabe that the paper — which, it should be noted, has been available on the internet for the past six years — "had resulted in embarrassment" for the Office.

In his "embarrassing" paper, Dr Raabe provides some pretty uncontroversial facts about homosexuals in the Canadian population back in 2005: at about 1 per cent of the population, they were not as numerous as the gay lobby would have had you believe; some of their practices such as anal sex carried high risk of infection; many young gay men ignored the potential for non-HIV sexually transmitted diseases.

Here is the bit that caused offence (or at least, the bit that I found offensive):

"The number of homosexuals in essentially all surveys is less than 3%. (Statistics Canada found only 1% of the population who described themselves as homosexual.) However, the percentage of homosexuals among pedophiles is 25%. (Blanchard R et al. Fraternal birth order and sexual orientation in pedophiles. Archives of Sexual Behavior 2000; 29: 463-78.) Therefore, the prevalence of pedophilia among homosexuals is about 10-25 times higher than one would expect if the proportion of pedophiles were evenly distributed within the (hetero- and homosexual) populations."

I challenged Dr Raabe last night about the link between homosexuals and paedophiles: researchers in the US and UK have consistently failed to find any links between adult homosexuality and child abuse. Dr Raabe told me "I would be delighted to review any new evidence regarding the problematic issue of whether there may or may not be any association between paedophilia and homosexuality; above all I would be delighted to see studies that show that there is no link." I asked him if he considered himself anti-gay: "I am not anti-gay. As a doctor and a Christian, I have helped and treated everyone with care and totally irrespective of their ethnicity, religious belief, political opinion and totally irrespective of their sexual orientation." Contrary to the impression created in some quarters, he assured me, he had "an open mind".

Unfortunately, though, the Home Office does not share the doctor's "open mind". They have refused, so far, to review his case. No matter that this doctor has years of experience with substance abusers, or that his robust, zero-tolerance attitude to drugs is increasingly being adopted on both sides of the pond (look at Sweden for an interesting example): by offending a particular interest group, Dr Raabe has forfeited more than his public post – his right to free speech.